On Valentine’s Day, two artist talks unfolded simultaneously across two continents, within exhibitions that mirror one another in method and intention.
At Gallery Guðmundsdóttir, Berlin, I was in conversation with curator Jonatan Habib Engqvist about Transit – Geometry of Passage. At the Origins Centre, Johannesburg, Imagine Visionary Animals was discussed with the Archaeological Society.
Both exhibitions are currently on view and present site-responsive paintings that engage directly with the architecture in which they are installed. The works do not simply inhabit the space—they mirror and refract it. By depicting the very structures that contain them, the paintings fold the room back into itself, opening a threshold where passage becomes perceptible.
The viewer is invited into another dimension of perception—where space carries memory, and deep time quietly surfaces within the present.
Warm thanks to Ntshadi Mofokeng for extending the Johannesburg dialogue.
#contemporaryart #gallerygudmundsdottir #origincentrewits #contemporarypainting #berlinartgallery
Two years ago I got my first print byline in the @mailandguardian_friday writing about how nascent performing arts organizing efforts in South Africa were pushing for policy change to protect performers’ and technicians’ livelihoods. There’s much still to be done but that moment felt special! The coming together, the intergenerational dialogues, the rigorous policy discussions, the creative protests, and the fun!
The radical potential (and pitfalls) of performance has been a preoccupation
📍America, July 2024
The Northwestern University Performance Studies Summer Institute was a deep dive into themes I’ve been preoccupied with for the past couple years and introduction to some (new to me) explorations through prison drama programs, symbolisms of modernity in archival photography, as well as martial arts in relation to Black power. The question of whether performance is inherently liberatory has been haunting me ever since along with thinking about the specific ways that Black people express radical ideas/modes of being through performance.
📖 Got another chance to spend time with Claudia Marion Stemberger edited and curated catalogue, “Alterating Conditions: Performing Performance Art in South Africa” (2011) that I first spotted at Raw Academy.
The OFF was very ON! No biennial postponement formed against us (Tarisse Iriarte @curatedconcepts and I) could prosper.
📍Senegal, June 2024
Went in thinking about performance art and its special place somewhere straddling the imaginary boundaries of the visual and the performing arts as well as how different audiences engage with the ideas embedded in performances. Left struck by the choices of materials used ranging from fragile to durable; the presence and relation with Afro Caribbean artists; as well as how literature and art can reflect each other.
👣 Place du Souvenir, Musée de la Femme Henriette Bathily, Centre de Ressources Ousmane Sembène, Institut Culturel Italien Dakar, Centre Cultural de Blaise Senghor, Musée Théodore Monod d’Art Africain, Sebele Yoon, RAW Material Company, Délégation Wallonie Bruxelles, Gorée Island Museum, Espaces Trames, Galerie Cécile Fakhoury, Musée de Civilisations Noirs, Loman Art House, African Renaissance Monument Museum
Independent research trip supported by NYU Tisch Center for Research and Study.
Third space 📐
~ not home, not work/school
~ communal space with possibilities for reimagining the way we live together in this fraught fraught world
📍Argentina, January 2024
Inspired by the constant public reminders of, not only, the state terror of the 1970s-1980s but, especially, of the resistance of the people. Filled with conviction, persistence, creativity and relentless solidarity. A legacy that lives in resistance today to the rise of the right.
Some out of order translations from the street art:
How was it possible that children were born in this place?
The heart is never on the right
Antifascist lesbian body
The body does not lie
Thinking is a revolutionary (f)act
Recover the magic
Minimum wage equal to the family basket
Peace, bread and work
Argentina: Artistic Activism, Social Justice, and Radical Education in a Third Space - Study Abroad course with Dipti Desai & Carol Anne Spreen
Support from Oppenheimer Memorial Trust and NYU Steinhardt Global Affairs
🎓
Unquantifiable sentiments
Crashing contradictions
Abundant gratitude
What’s true without a doubt is that I walked this tumultuous year in good, safe company
And unrelated but adjacent I got to dance my little butt off at nora chipaumire’s ShebeenDUB as though it were an after party meant just for me and my friends, old and new!!!
Tip of the hat to everyone who’s art has raised me and who’s teaching has moulded me
Looking forward to being in conversation with @theatre.work.book co-authors Brídín Clements Cotton & Natalie Robin as well as production manager Delaney Teehan.
May 21
6:00pm
@nyuabudhabi
19 Washington Square North
New York
For RSVP and more about the book, follow @theatre.work.book
About the book: ‘Theatre Work: Reimagining the Labor of Theatrical Production’ is inspired by the worker-driven advocacy efforts of the recent years and their own work in theatrical production. Cotton and Robin investigate the past, present and future of theatrical production practices, from the little-known history of the labor unions involved, through the present-day common abuses of workers, towards a future with more equitable and sustainable career paths.
From an essay to a zine…
Reflection on Germaine Acogny and Mikaël Serre’s “À un Endroit au Début/Somewhere at the Beginning” and Gregory Maqoma’s “Exit/Exist”
Some day I’ll revisit these and incorporate nora chipaumire’s “portrait of myself as my father” and Sylvia Wynter’s “‘We Know Where We Are From’: The Politics of Black Culture from Myal to Marley”
